An interview and preview:<P> <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR><B>Moses' commandment: Thou shalt dance</B><P>By Rachel Howard, SF Examiner<P> Robert Moses is scarfing down lunch during his spare hour between running rehearsal and teaching class.<P> "I do rail against being categorized," he says from behind a mountain of fried rice. "Maybe if I was psychoanalyzed someone could tell me why I'm that way."<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P><A HREF="http://63.78.169.150/style/default.jsp?story=x0227moses" TARGET=_blank><B>More</B></A><p>[This message has been edited by Admin (edited June 25, 2002).]

Another story on Robert Moses:<P><A HREF="http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2001-03-07/dance.html" TARGET=_blank><B>Next of KIN</B></A><BR>Robert Moses' troupe fuses community and privacy, society and solitude<BR>Ann Murphy, SF Weekly

An interview and preview of this season's offerings.<P> <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Moving stories<BR>WITH BLACK CULTURE<BR>EVOLVING, MOSES' DANCES<BR>REVIEW ITS TRADITIONS<BR>AND TRACK PATTERNS <BR>BY ANITA AMIRREZVANI<BR>Mercury News <P>Talking with Robert Moses, a Stanford University dance teacher and choreographer, is a little like taking a fantastic voyage into the world of ideas. In an hourlong conversation, he ruminates on everything from W.E.B. DuBois' double-consciousness theory to the 1970s black sitcom ``Good Times,'' not to mention the history of the Bible, Ebonics and George Will.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P><A HREF="http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/arts/docs/moses30.htm" TARGET=_blank><B>more...</B></A>

A preview:<P> <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>THE WORD OF MOSES<BR>Award-winning choreographer gives rich black oral tradition a new expression<P>Vera H-C Chan, CONTRA COSTA TIMES<P>DANCE IS a silent language. It speaks in a vocabulary of gestures and footwork that at once interprets music and communicates the prose of movement. <P>To have dance tell the story of storytelling, though, seems a contrary notion. And it's certainly ambitious, which explains why Robert Moses had to make "Word of Mouth" into a full-length piece.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P><a href=http://www.contracostatimes.com/timeout/perform/stories/x3moses_20020203.htm target=_blank>More</a>

A positive review:<P> <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Robert Moses passes the 'Word' through powerful dance <BR>Ambitious new work explores black heritage<P>Octavio Roca, SF Chronicle<P>The ads are right: "Word of Mouth" is good for Robert Moses' Kin. <P>Friday night's world premiere at Cowell Theater fulfilled the promise of this young San Francisco troupe and gave notice that Moses is a choreographer to watch. The dance on first impression was as intriguing as it was entertaining, and the performance by Moses and his baker's dozen was often electrifying.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P><a href=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/02/04/DD177613.DTL target=_blank>More</a>

Robert Moses’ Kin<BR>Word of Mouth<BR>Cowell Theater<BR>February 2, 2002<P>I have been hearing about this company for a couple of years. I am familiar with the work of several of the dancers in the company. But I was still unprepared for the very professional performance I was offered on Saturday night. I have come to expect disappointment from most of the dance companies that are so often hyped in the Bay Area. There is repeatedly a lack of professionalism in the attitude of the performers and in the production values. This piece had none of that. And I was impressed.<P>The evening long piece in question was “Word of Mouth”. Robert Moses started out to make a work exploring the oral and musical traditions of storytelling in the African-American community, a subject with tremendous depth. This piece seems unfinished, and reading the program notes, it becomes apparent why. He intends there to be at least two more works on this subject. There is just that much material.<P>The structure of the piece was sometimes unclear. I found myself wondering which section we were in. Sometimes the sections transitioned through a change in music, sometimes it was a costume change, and sometimes it was just a different poem being projected on the scrim. It wasn’t consistent and became confusing. That was a minor problem however, and it did not detract from the overall positive effect of the piece. I felt like I was seeing something that was going to enrich my understanding of the African-American experience, even though I might not understand it all. The music was a combination of traditional folksongs, jazz, hip-hop, rap and gospel. The company seemed at its strongest when the music was the most driving, drawing energy off of it. The media projections were expertly executed by Austin Forbord, though at times they distracted from the dancing simply because they were so interesting themselves. They definitely added clarity to the piece as a whole and really solidified what the movement was trying to convey. All of the production elements (costumes, lights, sets, projections) were of the highest quality. This particular theater shows off dance very well, which was surely a contributing factor to the clean look and smooth running of the show.<P>The movement was fluid and organic with expressive use of arms and hands. Sometimes I felt they were using significant signs and gestures I wasn’t privy to, but that seemed to enhance the overall theme. The choreography is technically demanding and all of the dancers rose to the challenge, especially in the complicated turn sections. There was quite a bit of partnering, some of it beautifully inventive, and always appropriate to the music and story. Stand out dancers were Bliss Kohlmeyer (a blond Amazon with soul), Lauren Marcogliese (the queen of the club kids) and Danielle Colding (the only one who truly internalized the Afro-Carribean sections). Tristan Ching, whose stage presence can very pleasantly take over a piece, was surprisingly subdued until the second half where she suddenly seemed more like her charismatic self. Todd Eckert was particularly good in the “Learnin’ In Secret” solo. And Eckert joined by Jose Comoda and Carlos Gonzalez were hilariously accurate as a trio of posing street-smart wiseguys.<P>“Word of Mouth” is an ambitious venture. It could prove to catapult this company to the next level of professional quality and notoriety. And they would deserve it.<BR>

[For Eric and Kara Takashige Boehm]<P>My interview with Robert Moses took place at the counter of a noisy Starbucks down the block from where he was auditioning dancers for Robert Moses’ KIN Dance Company’s upcoming season. The ambient noise was more powerful than the new, but uncooperative tape recorder batteries I had bought earlier in the day at Best Buys. We struggled to have our conversation above the noise, with me scribbling in speedwriting. Several people who had seen KIN’s Word of Mouth earlier in the Spring at the Cowell Theater, had shared with me their sense that the company had “turned a corner,” and reached a “new level.” I asked Mr. Moses what he thought people meant by those words.<P>“I never know what people mean when they say that. I’ve heard it a number of times. I guess it has to do with where people do or do not expect you to go, or what they expect your abilities to be or not to be. I had the same experience when I made Supplicant, and Lucifer. I guess it’s good news that I am still turning corners I didn’t know I could turn. People have expectations when they say things like that. They don’t know what to make of it when you confound their expectations pleasantly. I guess they give you credit for that. <P>“For example, if people see work about The Angry Black Man, they expect to see it again and again. But sometimes I’m romantic, and they are surprised to see that coming from me.” As he seemed to consider all the possible ramifications, he added, “Of course, you want the level of clarity to increase in your later work; you always want to be more articulate. You want to communicate with a greater specificity. But value-laden words like “better” are sometimes hard to hear. They can have the effect of diminishing your past work, and your past experience.” <P>Robert Moses’ KIN is adopting a new, more formal structure for the company. I asked Mr. Moses how he sees that new structure affecting the company, and helping the future work of KIN. <P>“I want to get out of my own way. Robert Moses is a dancer, a choreographer and a teacher. That’s who I am. I am perceived as having a company, doing a few things with some people, including my wife [dancer Mary Carbonara]. We have to get out beyond that [narrow] conception of the company, but I’m not a businessman, I’m not a manager. I’ve been doing those things, but there are people who can move us forward, who have experience in ways that count.” The needs of the dancers are a chief concern for Mr. Moses: “We need somebody who will help us to be able to help the dancers in ways that I simply don’t know how to accomplish. We need to put a mechanism in place that gets us past continually having to reinvent the wheel. If I am going to be an effective artistic director, I have to step away from those kinds of responsibilities that take time away from artistry and creative work. While I can’t completely disconnect from the administrative life of the company, I do need to create space to do my work.”<P>With a number of companies and their artists feeling constrained by their administrative units, I asked what kind of models might best suit Robert Moses’ KIN.<P>“There are a number of administrative models that exist. I’m not sure yet which will work best for KIN. ODC-San Francisco has a three-pronged existence focused on its school, the building as a performance and exhibition space, and the company itself. That model works well for ODC. Lines Ballet Company is more driven by its school. [The Lines building location has served as the central San Francisco studio space for open classes in a variety of dance disciplines.] Joe [Goode] and Margie [Margaret Jenkins] have cut their overhead by not having a building, and by utilizing grants and residencies to obtain space. San Francisco Ballet practically has a corporate structure. Twyla [Tharpe] and Ralph [Lemon] have been dumping their companies because it has required spending too much time in the office, something you want to be wary of. In a capitalist system, financial success depends on money coming in. When you have a dance company, all the revenue goes out. You have to devise ways to get money coming into the company. <P>We shifted into a discussion about the link between teaching and building a company. About this, Mr. Moses said: “They are two very different things. Teaching a technique class gives your students solid grounding to apply outside the class itself, in applications much broader than the class. That’s why ballet works so well to train dancers. It is a beautiful system with broad application. Choreography is a different matter. In creating dance, it is not great if your work develops on a linear basis. You have to allow it to go where it wants to go. Your work is not a system in the way that teaching technique is a system. Dance is about imagery. It is a form of expression that is not linear in the way that music or literature is. We must stop treating dance as if it were music or literature, because while it sometimes tells a linear story, it reaches people in a different kind of way. From that point of view, you sometimes have to step away from the technical aspects, or even the idea. Sometimes you just need to go left because the dance tells you that’s the right thing to do. The temptation is to systematize dance. To the extent that dance is a system, it has to be serving the image, the motion, and not the other way around." <P>Material publicizing the company explains that part of Robert Moses’ intention in founding KIN was to begin a company that could give expression to the African-American experience. I asked where in that process the company is at this juncture. <P>“One of the things I have learned is that it is very difficult to give expression to the African-American experience, in general. That might sound like a cop-out,” Moses said, with a wry laugh, “but it’s not.<P>“You start out thinking: ‘I’m going to talk about the Black experience,’ but if you’re honest, you realize that there are a few Black experiences. There’s the Black under class. There’s the Black middle class. There’s the Black female experience, the Black male experience, the Black misogynist (expected), and the Black not-misogynist (unexpected). Really, there are a lot of things. We have defined ourselves like everyone else on earth by what holds us together. If I did material only about my roots, I would end up doing the hundredth piece about my roots. It would become boring, and I wouldn’t have addressed the ways in which the Black middle class is alienated because it is disconnected from the working class, or the relationships between male and female, or the stories that aren’t told. <P>“There’s the question, ‘What is it about your core experience that makes it possible to define yourself in relationship to what you struggle against?’ You don’t get to tell me I don’t exist because you want me to define myself in relationship to conflict, in a binary kind of way. We must define ourselves in relationship to what is distinctly ours, with the understanding that nobody has accomplished anything alone. <P>As an aside, he added, “The Bible is a good example of this: The Bible is the Word of God interpreted by a group of men. The stories in the Bible grew out of the experience of a core of people defining itself as moving toward or away from a group of ideas, but then it was interpreted and reconstructed by generations of people, from different historical experiences, and it became something different. You are defined by motion toward or away from whatever is pushing or pulling you. I am an African man living in America, not Africa; but trying to understand my roots. I am Black. I am a Black man whose sub-headings reflect a belief system developed in relationship to my experience on this continent, in the United States of America.<P>“I was in Minneapolis recently, where some Africans are having problems with American Blacks. They are saying things like ‘They’re lazy, they’re shiftless.’ Well, where did they get those arbitrary, biased ideas? They got them from the institutions in America. The experience is defined in relationship to those institutions—moving toward or away from them. For example, I have a certain response to the southern, Black drawl when I hear it. I can click right into it. Those African men don’t have that response. They can’t do that. They can respond in part, for example, to The Blues, because the roots of The Blues are found in the survivals of African music. But there are elements that are part of the African Diaspora that they do not have the identity to connect with. There are some elements that they can connect with, and some that they cannot. My work has to be in support of thriving, not just surviving. It has to hold out something to look forward to, mostly by being inclusive, but also, some lines must be drawn.” <P>Earlier, I had watched part of the audition Mr. Moses was conducting. I asked him what he was looking for in the audition. <P>“I am trying to get some collaboration going. I bring in dancers who can work in an idiom outside of what is normally considered dance. Truthfully, I don’t know what I’m looking for in an audition. I guess I could say that I expect you to have this level of technique, or be able to do that number of pirouettes. But then I found in my work with Taiko, that there are a lot of things I can’t do—yet—in disciplines outside of dance. At a certain point, the question becomes: ‘Can you work consistently to develop the spark, the something that jumped out at me in the audition?’ My need is to not lose rehearsal time working over things that some people can pick up right away. If I spend time to support dancers in that way, I lose precious creative time. The question isn’t so much ‘What am I looking for?’ as ‘What have you got? What do you bring into the studio?’ If I have to look for it, the chances are I’m not going to find it.”<P>Mr. Moses reflected on some of the treasures he has found: “Sometimes I’ll just see a beautiful person doing amazing things. A lot of times I’ll see people who look like they’re not sure. If they’re not sure, chances are they’re not interested. Sometimes it comes down to puppy love. I immediately love who I see and what I see them doing.”<BR> <BR>“Are you ever looking for people who look like they can dance your roles, who look like you?” I asked.<P>“No, I’m not looking for people who look like me,” Mr. Moses responded emphatically. “I can coach them to move in a certain way, but mostly I’m asking the question ‘What opens you up to do other things?’ My job is to put things together, to find people with both range and ensemble capacity. You have to be clear about what you express, and be able to express more than one thing. You have to know when you hit a note in harmony with someone across the room. I am not looking for me in other dancers. I’m not in my own world. I don’t care about that. Even if it’s sometimes dazzling, it can also be boring if that’s what I look for over and over.” <P>I asked Mr. Moses what kind of curriculum he thinks modern dancers require. <P>“I think they should do everything: In order to have range, you need to be well trained. You can’t let yourself be embarrassed if you don’t look good doing this or that. In the studio, that shouldn’t matter—initially. You have to be willing to look like an idiot, at times. That is the only way to explore new motion, new sensations.” He pointed to the denotation of 15 sensations in some of the martial arts, such as Capoeira and the Asian disciplines, where tours are done on the horizontal. “You have to be able to be open to do everything you can. When I went to Bali, I was the slowest in the group. I had to accept that I was the least capable person in that group. It was hard to be that person, to realize that you’re slow at doing ‘their thing.’ It slaps your ego around: ‘Why don’t I understand this?’ You have to come face to face with the fact that it demands rigorous training of another kind, and that no one person can get it all. You are self-conscious about your environment, and you realize (painfully) that you are informed by your experience and how much you are attached to it.” <P>Where does most of your creative work take place?<P>“I use everything, whatever and however it comes to me. I keep notebooks, I have titles in my head, and I use what happens in the studio, phrases that just come. I use my personal history, our collective history, or an experience that resonates. My job is to make someone relate to the experience. For example, I love Cunningham. To me, he is the most amazing artist because I don’t relate to his experience, but I see it anyway, in what he creates. I have to shed myself of myself and just have the experience. My job is to make someone who is the diametrical opposite of me, someone like Rush Limbaugh [laughter], whose experience precludes looking at the particulars—my job is to make all that fall away, so that someone like him—even he sees the beauty.” <P>I asked what the biggest frustrations were in this process. <P>“I have to get myself out of the way, stop procrastinating, stop getting stuck so that I can enjoy other people, get some money for the company, some space in which to work, some original composers to choreograph to. In the film Pollack, the artist basically got in his own way. He let people push him into situations he didn’t need to be in. Sometimes, I just need to go home, close the door, be with my wife, and be with the dancers who know me. Time is our currency. We need time—away. Time in a cabin in the country would be ideal, making work with bodies. Bodies are voices, color, and texture for my work. I need to be around people who force me to look at them anew, to avoid using them in the same way. “<P>I asked Moses how he chooses music.<P>“I pick what I like, anything from John Cage to hip hop. I like to listen to George Clinton. None of this has a thing to do with music theory. I like the ambient bass in Bill Lasswell. Some people work at realizing an idea through dance. But dance isn’t just an idea. You have to see the flesh and blood first and foremost. That’s what I was going for with Word of Mouth. Reality is more important than the idea. It’s the universities and academic environment that insist on the overlay of The Idea. They flatten out the reality to satisfy their grant requirements.<P>“You have to be totally honest with yourself about your work. When you make something that you think is crap, you have to tell yourself, ‘That’s crap.’ Sometimes, it takes months to look at something honestly. You see little shards. Your job is not to create work for the grant givers, but to satisfy the dancers. You want them to grow, and you have to provide the fertile ground for that to happen.”<BR>

_________________"Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation!" Eddie Izzard

<P> <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR><B>I guess it's good news that I am still turning corners I didn't know I could turn.</B><BR>An Interview with Robert Moses, <BR>Artistic Director, Robert Moses' KIN<BR>June 2002<P>By Toba Singer <P>My interview with Robert Moses took place at the counter of a noisy Starbucks down the block from where he was auditioning dancers for Robert Moses' KIN Dance Company's upcoming season. The ambient noise was more powerful than the new, but uncooperative tape recorder batteries I had bought earlier in the day at Best Buy. We struggled to have our conversation above the noise, with me scribbling in speedwriting. Several people who had seen KIN's Word of Mouth earlier in the spring at the Cowell Theater, had shared with me their sense that the company had "turned a corner," and reached a "new level." I asked Mr. Moses what he thought people meant by those words.<P>"I never know what people mean when they say that. I've heard it a number of times. I guess it has to do with where people do or do not expect you to go, or what they expect your abilities to be or not to be. I had the same experience when I made Supplicant, and Lucifer. I guess it's good news that I am still turning corners I didn't know I could turn. People have expectations when they say things like that. They don't know what to make of it when you confound their expectations pleasantly. I guess they give you credit for that."<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P><A HREF="http://www.criticaldance.com/interviews/rmoses020625.html" TARGET=_blank><B>More</B></A>

Robert Moses' Kin just keeps getting more legit. Its 12-member roster of dancers actually embodies an identifiable choreographic style -- fluid, urgent, flooded with busy arms and flickering with intense energy like electricity passing through a current -- so it's no coincidence that the troupe is one of the most professional and crowd-pleasing in The City. <a href=http://63.78.169.150/ex_files/default.jsp?story=X0214MOSESw target=_blank>more</a>

Promise, not polish in new Moses Kin uneven in first of two programs at Cowell Theater

Octavio Roca, SF Chronicle Dance Critic

Word of mouth has been good, and there is real promise in the latest offerings from Robert Moses' Kin. <a href=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/02/17/DD121295.DTL target=_blank>more</a>

Few of the Bay Area’s modern choreographers are more highly regarded than Robert Moses and with his latest offering, “A Biography of Baldwin,” which premiered during his company’s latest season at the Cowell Theater, he once more shows us the pleasure of his elegantly intelligent and yet vital work.

For this first installment of what is envisioned as a three part series, Moses uses excerpts from a 1961 panel between James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Emile Capouya and Alfred Kazin as the backdrop for his deceptively impassive, albeit energetic choreography. While the text is a potent political discussion what it means to be a Black writer in America, Moses sets his eight dancers into abstract Cunningham-esque motion against the words, with no apparent agenda evident from the actual steps, but a world of meaning implicit in the steps combined with the words. The result is a serendipitous visual meditation on the clash between aesthetics and politics.

Constructed deftly and with his trademark briskly vibrant use of arms and weight, “A Biography of Baldwin” shows lines and movement from all angles to create a prismatic view of the group. The patterns are at times regular, but morph and shift so that on occasion the coincidence of the text and movement brings new ideas to mind. When the dancers assemble into an X formation it recalls a population at a crossroads, in a kind of organized contention.

It is hard to look at Moses’ multi-ethnic company and not consider how far we may have come in terms of race relations in this country, but how far we have yet to go. And while his dancers, many of whom gave powerful performances, are stronger than ever, there is still none to compare with Moses himself, whose “Solo Suite” perfectly demonstrated his magnetic quality and fluid style.

Excerpted from three other works, included one choreographed for him by Alonzo King, “Solo Suite” uncannily shows us Moses, the performer, as a “deep river.” An unusual mover, his own dancing never appear calculated or forced, but rather heartfelt, as if he were impelled by the sheer pleasure of controlling space.

Bliss Kohlmeyer, while an obviously accomplished performer, has not quite his same quality in her solo, “Doscongio.” Although flawlessly executed, there is an air of detachment to her movement, an internalization, that lessens the impact of the inherent humour and liveliness of the choreography.

There is a similar feeling from other works throughout the evening, although there are more than occasional flashes of dancers inspired to give themselves over to the moment. Amy Foley, leading the charge in “Lucifer’s Prance,” which opened the evening to the strains of Philip Glass’s “Akhenaten,” was a light, spry interpreter of the vagaries of the Minimalist music. This Glass work reminds me of nothing so much as Darth Maul battling Obi-Wan Kenobi in “The Phantom Menace,” and the general air of the piece is one of intense ceremony. Nevertheless, Foley and Tristan Ching found a less mechanical, more human reading within the bacchanalian drive of the score.

Other works on the program included the homespun “Blood in Time,” “3 Quartets for 4 and the Second is 2,” as well as the world premiere of “The Soft Sweet Smell of Firm Warm Things.”

It was a program that contained more than enough strong pieces, and my only quibble might be with its length. By the time the last piece rolled around, I was feeling a trifle bombarded, although still dazzled by the proficiency of the company as a whole. Nevertheless, four, or even five pieces, would have left me more than satisfied.

Robert Moses’ KIN appears through February 23, 2003 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco. Program 2 is “Word of Mouth.”

Jimmy's blues Robert Moses premieres a Baldwin-inspired work. By Rita Felciano THESE DAYS SOME of the Bay Area's most striking dancers perform with the eight-year-old Robert Moses' Kin Dance Company. They are an even dozen (including one apprentice), in addition to Moses, who still dances circles around everyone. The women are technically stronger than the men; as a group they devour Moses's lush choreography with an almost voracious appetite. Amy Foley, Bliss Kohlmyer, and Tristan Ching couldn't be more different, yet they are equally radiant, challenged by choreography that calls on their minds as well as on their muscles.

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